Investigating Different Narrative Conventions In Short Film (Summary)

Having looked at a range of short film conventions, let's now focus on how we will include these in our own production.

Number of characters
As Oli explained in the previous post, short films usually only focus a small number of characters. We decided to follow this trend in only including four deifferent characters in the narrative. This will allow the audience to focus more on the individual person instead of having to worry too much about the relationship between a range of characters.

Plot twist
The one thing that sets a good short film apart from others is a good and unexpected plot twist.
For this reason we decided that our film should definitively feature one, in the form of one of the characters being reveald to somebody completely else.

Situation
Oli explained that short films are often set in everyday situations, e.g. an office.
Whilst a robbery is not exactly what most people would name as part of their daily routine, the location we chose certainly is.
In addition to this, the theme of disagreement and arguments that shape the narrative are something most people can relate to very well.

Buget
Like most Indy filmmakers, we are very much restriced by our budget. Not being funded by any production companies we need to resort to our own savings.
In order to keep track of the money we spend I created an additional post where I list all of our expenses. It should be interesting to see what the overall production cost of our project will be.

Length
As the name suggests, short films are short.
We agreed that we want our film to be of a simialar length to the movies we analysed, which is about 7 minutes long. This will give us enough time to set up the background story, inroduce the characters and tell the story.



Todorov's theory

With many successfull short films, such as The Black Hole and Losses following the pattern of equilibrium – disequilibrium – restoring of equilibrium – twist it would be a wise choice to do the same. This is certainly something that we will keep in mind when we finalise the narrative.